Spent a rather nice Sunday with a group of fellow Thingboxers getting a tour of the site for the London Olympics just a few weeks before most of it is sealed off for construction work.

We were guided by the knowledgable Darren, and despite the fact that it rained almost the entire time, it was a very enjoyable few hours.

I have put a few photos on my Flickr account until I get round to fixing whatever is going wrong with the gallery software on this website.

Flicker photo gallery

Thingbox

I have moved this website to a new server hardware - may be problems for a few days while I tidy up the migration.

For some reason, copying the blog software from one machine to another didn’t work at all and had to completly reinstall everything from scratch - and it looks like the gallery didn’t move across properly either.

Damn.

Not something I usually lose a lot of sleep over - but I just installed a new printer at home, and I was struck by the size of the instruction manuals (note the plural).

The main manual is 24 pages per language - in 5 different languages.

Now I know that is to make it easier to ship the units around Europe - but if you take the 96 pages I didn’t need then multiply that by the number of printers sold each year - that is a heck of a lot of trees being chopped down.

There is a second 54 page manual in loads of languages, plus a few smaller documents and promo items.

Ideally, they should have just a simple “get you up and started” manual - which was included in this printer, then if I want the in-depth manual, I can print off the required version from the installation CD.

Ironically, I only thought about this as there was a (multiple language) statement booklet on compliance with the European Electronics Waste regulations!

I am currently ordering a new webserver for my commercial sites to cope with traffic growth.

Just to be sure I understood things correctly - as I am not really a hardware sort of guy, I posted a message comparing two potential options on a webmaster discussion forum i use.

Got some useful replies, and gratifyingly it seems that I also was correct in my presumptions
However, I then got a sales pitch by private message from a UK based hosting firm - which was fairly obviously a generic copy/paste sales message.

In itself, that is a bit annoying - but was was doubly annoying was the fact that I had just laid out my needs and concerns in the discussion forum, so the hosting firm had an ideal chance to sell me their services by responding to those issues and showing how they were ideal in resolving them.

But no - they wasted the opportunity with a silly bit of generic spam which also therefore doubly annoyed me for being spam, and for being a really bad sales pitch.

If the company is too lazy to tailor its sales pitches based on information that I had freely given in the discussion thread - then I doubt they would be any good at resolving any future issues I might have.

What a waste of an opportunity on their part.

My local newspaper is running a “competiton” for 4 guys to get 12 weeks free tutition at the local gym, along with nutrituion advice and general makeover stuff. You just need to write a weekly diary of your experiences.

I am actually quite tempted by the idea.

I am going to the gym on the estate where I live, but could do with a proper training regime - and this might be quite fun.

My big worry is that it will be too much like those awful BBC/ITV makeover shows where the person is made out to be more of a freak by the presenters. That would be too embaressing.

I shall ponder the issue.